CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“I haven’t sat on my porch in so long. This is nice.”
It was just me and Kael, with the occasional passing car for company.
“I’d sit out here almost every day when I first moved in. I couldn’t believe it. My porch. My place.” I stopped and smiled. “It feels good, you know? The street in front of you, the house behind you.”
Talking to Kael was like writing in a diary, sort of.
“I’ve always loved sitting out front. Wherever I’ve lived. Did you notice that swing on my dad’s porch? We moved that swing with us when we were growing up. It came from base to base, from house to house—kind of like my dad’s recliner.”
I could feel Kael listening, encouraging me to go on.
“When we first moved to Texas, we didn’t have a big enough porch, so we kept it in the shed. It’s heavy wood . . . you can see where it’s splintered in a few places and where it’s worn down on the arms a little. It’s not like that plastic outdoor furniture you get now. What’s it called—rosin?”
“Resin,” he said, helping me out.
“That’s it—resin.” I was thinking about my mom now, how she would sit out front on the porch steps in the dark and stare up at the sky. “When we were in Texas my mom practically lived on our porch, all year round. I always wondered what she was looking at. What she was thinking about when she stared at the dark sky for hours.”
I thought about the nights when she didn’t have the swing and how she would just sit there, a little lost, but still focused on the sky.
“She always made up stories about the sky. The sun, the moon, the stars. She really lived in her own head, a lot like me, I guess.” I paused. “She was quite dramatic. She told me once that she believed God was made up of all the stars and that when one burned out, a little bit of the good in the world died with it.”
Kael’s eyes were on me, and I was aware of how the heat was spreading on my cheeks. The way I was talking . . . well, it was like I was thinking out loud. I barely realized it. I knew that it sounded cheesy. I’d read things like that in books sometimes or had seen it in movies, but it hardly seemed possible, in real life, to instantly connect and feel so comfortable with a stranger. What a cliché. Yet there I was, being opened by someone I hadn’t even known for a week.
“I mean, it was way more complicated than that, obviously. That was the quick version. There were civilizations whose entire religions were based on the galaxy of planets and stars. My mom used to tell me all about them. I mean, it makes sense, doesn’t it? They were here first.”
Kael spoke up. “Were they?”
His words seemed important, there were so few of them. I guess that’s why when he asked me questions, I wanted to really think about my answers.
“I’m not entirely sure,” I finally said. “What do you believe in?”
He shook his head. “I’m still figuring that out.”
“I think that’s okay,” I told him. “There are so many different religions . . . too hard to get people to agree on one thing. I think it’s okay to take a little time, learn a little more. Don’t you?” Such a heavy question, and wrapped in the most casual bow.
He sighed, blowing out a puff of air. I could hear the whisper of his words coming together but couldn’t quite make them out. The longer he sat on his opinion, licking slowly at his lips, chewing on his cheek, the more I anticipated his answer. Time melted as I waited.
“Thinking for yourself is better than being blindly led,” he said at long last. “I just want to be a good person. I know a lot of people inside and outside the church who are both bad and good. There’s so much out there that’s bigger than us . . . I’d rather focus on how to make things better than wonder how we got here in the first place. For now, at least.”
He sounded so sure. These were the deepest thoughts he had shared since we met.
A car door slammed, and my phone buzzed with a text from Elodie. She was going to someone’s house—someone named Julie—where all the wives, except her, would start their evening with a few drinks and catty conversation. I dimmed my screen and put my phone facedown on the concrete porch.
“I have a lot of shit to make up for before my life is over.” Kael’s confession startled me. His voice slipped a little at the end and the gravity of what he was saying ate at me. My throat burned and I swallowed, trying to dilute it, but it didn’t work. It was physically painful to think about the kinds of things Kael had seen at his age—atourage.
I wished I was someone who wasn’t so affected by the emotions around me. It would have been easier not to take on other people’s troubles, not to make them my own, but I’d always felt so much, ever since I was a child. I was always either burning or floating, moving from one extreme to another. “Karina feels things deeply,” my mother said of me. “She takes things to heart.”
Kael cleared his throat. I wanted so badly to ask him what he had to make up for, but I wanted him to tell me at his own pace, not because I asked. I could feel him next to me, brewing, but I kept my eyes on the sky, blinking and watching as blue swirled into orange. I pictured him with a gun strapped to his chest, a boyish smile. I didn’t know what he’d experienced over there, but that blank stare on his face . . . I had to say something.
“I don’t think it works like that. Your life isn’t a debt for someone else’s sins. You’re a good person, you deserve to be safe.”
My words fell short of all that I wanted to say, but I wanted him to feel everything I felt for him in that moment.
“Safe?” he asked, as the clouds drifted over us. “From who?”